Human Resources must ‘return to its roots’

The challenge for people in human resource management is to spark changes in organisations which may have become altogether set in their ways, writes Kyran Fitzgerald.

In business, it can be hard not to be bedazzled by the daily events. Of course, it is vital to keep one’s eye on the road.

The Brexit juggernaut is rumbling onwards. Will it slow down in time? Who knows?

Certainly, it is best to be prepared. But our future will not be determined solely by what transpires in the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe.

Society in general and the workplace, in particular, however, is undergoing a more fundamental transformation driven by the waves of technology now crashing onto our shores.

The country’s human resources (HR) managers gathered recently at the annual conference of the CIPD, the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development, to consider such weighty matters.

The topic of the moment was the future of work and it was one which was addressed by a wide variety of guest speakers.

The world of HR can sometimes feel like a draughty place.

Too often, practitioners are left feeling exposed. For all their good intentions, HR executives can feel removed from the decision taking process, viewed as mere bearers of bad news, conveying decisions to employees which have been determined in executive suites and boardrooms, often far away.

Increasingly, however, many inhabitants of boardrooms themselves appear to be out of touch with changes that bear down at gale force speed.

Tech terms were bandied about with abandon. There was a robot, called Pepper, in attendance. Speakers cooed over this smart child.

This writer would have been tempted to bring along a hammer and use it on the pesky machine. But one must suppress such instincts. All this transformation, in real time or in prospect, is deeply unsettling for us humanoids.

As the CIPD director Mary Connaughton put it: “People need something to cling to.”

The prevailing view is that employees need to retool and that the reskilling must take place at both local or company level and at national level.

This view appears to be accepted by the guest speaker, Mary Mitchell O’Connor, the Minister of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. “Skills will be increasingly important in a post-Brexit trading environment”, she suggested.

The Government has ambitious plans. But can these be delivered on?

Under the National Skills Strategy, 50,000 apprenticeships and traineeships are due to be delivered in the period to 2020, while the number of researchers employed in enterprises is due to increase from 25,000 to 40,000 over that time frame.

All of which is fine, but is our education system up to the task of meeting the requirements of a rapidly evolving economy?

Peter Cheese, director of CIPD UK, pointed to what he considers as “the growing mismatch” between what educators can provide and the skills needed.

Ireland’s open labour market provides additional challenges. Research by the CIPD and LinkedIn highlight a difficulty in finding people with high-end skills.

Mr Cheese took employers to task for their failure to invest sufficiently in the creation of jobs that make the best use of our graduate intake. He is certainly onto something.

Too many graduates, outside the fast growth industries, at least, spend their early working years in posts that make little use of their talents. Too many also emerge from our third level institutions without the skill sets required in a fluid working environment.

Peter Cheese pointed to an “outflow of critical talent to the UK and the US” and suggested that we will need to “rebuild skills critical to the agility of organisations”.

And the CIPD’s Ms Connaughton repeated this warning.

While the CIPD-LinkedIn survey revealed that Ireland is good at attracting and retaining people with technical skills, the skills we are losing are of equal importance: Skills in relationship management, customer service, sales, key skill sets.

The country’s success in establishing itself as an information technology hub may be insulating it from the pressures arising from a high cost of living and relatively high levels of marginal as opposed to standard rate income tax.

One of the issues touched on at the conference, but not really addressed, is the curious phenomenon of rapid technological change running in tandem with a slowing in productivity gains across the workforce as a whole.

The transformations originating in Silicon Valley, in particular, are not reflected in outperformance on the factory floor. One wonders whether there are problems with data collection, or whether innovations are concentrated in the wrong areas.

Perhaps one part of the problem may lie in the quality of management. Are the right people being promoted and when they are, is enough being done to impart the correct skill sets?

Mr Cheese said: “Historically people have been promoted on the basis of technical proficiency.”

An example of the ‘Peter Principle’ where people rise beyond the level at which they display their greatest competence?

“If you require a flexible working environment, you need to train the managers with this in mind,” he said, but cautioned against ‘presenteeism’ and the tendency to equate performance with time input.

And he posed this question to his HR audience: “Are our people management practices fit for purpose? You don’t improve peoples’ performance by having a stilted conversation with them every six months in a bi-annual appraisal.”

The CIPD chief believes that such an approach is out of tune with the requirements of a young Gen Y group which seeks regular feedback and which is more willing to move jobs regularly.

The profession and managers need to step back from the rules-based approach that has emerged over the past few decades on the back of a series of business scandals, beginning perhaps with the Maxwell-Mirror Group debacle. The problem being that “if you write a load of rules, people cede personal accountability.”

What is required, he suggests, is a full review of corporate governance rules. And, this implies that HR as a profession must “return to its roots”.

Life in so many walks of life has become heavily bureaucratised. Nurses, teachers, lecturers and police personnel all regularly complain of the time they must devote to form filling or tasks involving ‘box ticking.’

The challenge then is for people in human resource management to rediscover a sense of creativity and by that means to play a part in sparking changes in organisations which may have become altogether set in their ways.